clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: NCAA Bluffed Penn St. Edition

News and commentary from around the Big Blue Internet. UK Hoops plays only exhibition tonight. Women's soccer in SEC Tournament semifinal. More.

By Glenn Logan

If you buy something from an SB Nation link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Brian Spurlock-US PRESSWIRE

NCAA internal emails show it’s discomfort with acting in the Penn St. case, and actually bluffed Penn State into accepting the penalty. Consider:

Former NCAA vice president of enforcement Julie Roe and NCAA vice president of academic membership affairs Kevin Lennon admitted that they probably didn’t have the authority to punish Penn State.

But it was a popular idea among fans and some school presidents. The NCAA correctly guessed that PSU would accept heavy sanctions (the “consent decree” refers to the school’s acceptance of fault and sanctions) rather than risk the negative PR of fighting against them. Penn State could’ve taken the issue to the Committee on Infractions, as most schools do when accused by the NCAA of breaking rules, instead of consenting. [My emphasis]

I’ve written at length about this in the past, so I won’t do so again here, but this whole affair from the NCAA standpoint was one giant ethics train wreck. The NCAA did it because they thought they could look good doing so, and because Penn St. was so beaten down that they rightly figured they’d have no choice but to accept whatever punishment the NCAA doled out.

Unethical, unethical, unethical. The end. That’s why they were so quick to lift sanctions that they had absolutely no business imposing. Think about that for a minute — they let the fans influence their decision.

Finally, why isn’t this bigger news? Nobody’s tweeting about it, nobody seems to care. Pathetic. Well, the legal system is about to drop the hammer on the NCAA’s abuse of power to some degree. We’ll see what happens next.

Tweet of the Morning

I’m sorry to say that this is the thinking of far too many people. It should trouble everyone who wants to see organizations act ethically and within the scope of their authority and not as a proxy for public mood.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

  • Kentucky, Auburn game to decide Georgia’s fate. I think their fate was likely sealed last weekend. Even at home, I don’t like Georgia’s chances against Auburn.

  • To get to a bowl, Kentucky will have to earn it. That’s absolutely right, and it will be hard. Georgia is a likely loss, Tennessee in Knoxville will be very tough, and Louisville at the Pizza Pit will be tough as well. If this team wants a bowl, they are going to have to up their game or wait until next season.

  • Undisciplined runs drawing the ire of Kentucky’s coaching staff, according to Jennifer Smith. Consider:

    That 25-yard reverse field touchdown he had to open overtime at Florida might have been the worst best thing to happen to the freshman running back.

    “He has a special kind of skill set, a special talent, and right now, he’s his own worst enemy,” UK running backs coach Chad Scott said Tuesday.

    I was thinking of exactly that play watching Williams run east-west on Saturday. He freelances way too much. It’s understandable, in high school you could do that without any consequences, and usually with great success. In college, you have to follow your blocking.

  • Meanwhile, Kyle Tucker writes about the offensive line’s struggles this season. Cole Mosier took Mark Stoops’ fire-breathing remonstration in the right spirit:

    “I was more inspired by it, because it’s the truth,” said the redshirt freshman left guard, a walk-on who has been pressed into service earlier than expected. “You gotta take the truth and slap it in the face.”

    Not sure about the mangled metaphor, but I think he’s got the right idea.

Kentucky basketball
Other Kentucky sports
College football
College basketball
Other sports news

  • John Wall is pretty fast. Heh. Indeed. Let us never forget this fast break against North Carolina:

    This is one long smile.

Other news

  • OS X malware infecting connected Apple devices through USB devices. USB’s are insecure anyway, be sure to only use USB’s that you can personally vouch for, and never use them on machines you don’t own or control.

  • Rumors start to emerge about the Samsung Galaxy S6. I recently left Apple for Android and bought a GS5, and I like it much better (so far, that is, it’s been less than a month). I should’ve known, since I’ve been using open-source software for a decade and a half.

  • Oil prices at a 4-year low, and why Saudi Arabia won’t mind.

    So what has changed? In 2013, United States became the largest producer of oil in the world, displacing Saudi Arabia. The shale oil fields of the United States are producing a lot of oil, and this has helped the country to become the largest producer of oil in the world. This has led to American imports of oil from Saudi Arabia coming down. Data from the US Energy Information Administration tells us that the imports from Saudi Arabia comprised of around 4.6% of total US oil consumption in August 2014. This is down from 7 percent in August 2013. [My emphasis]

    Okay, this is not an invitation to engage in political commentary, so please resist the temptation or I’ll resist it for you. But it is interesting that we have come so far so fast when it comes to a commodity that only a half-decade or so ago was considered to be at peak possible production.

    Is there anything not metaphysical that technology cannot solve?

  • Microsoft is making Office free for iPad, iPhone, and Android? Makes sense. After all, who’s going to use office apps on phones and laptops? Not me. All I need is a way to view the documents, and that’s already available for free.

More From A Sea Of Blue